Business Insider’s essential social media marketing tips for China

Business Insider has a quality guest article providing three tips for social media marketing in China.

Precious little is known about the workings of the Chinese digital landscape abroad, making the comments particularly interesting. They are below published verbatim.

1. Forget facebook and Twitter. Yes this may be tough to digest; however it’s just a complete fallacy if you expect to tap into the conversations, friend networks and forums that mandarin/Cantonese speaking Chinese populate. They are blocked in China by Government censorship (deal with it) and the local networks have had a massive head start to establish themselves as global players. Chinese everywhere of any relationship to the mainland frequent sites such as Douban, Renren, Kaixin and they shop on TaoBao.  How much of your communication is directed on these channels?

2. Use Blogger Influence. No one is more influential than a peer to peer referral.  Chinese especially adopt their favorite bloggers as their own.  Be sure to research key online bloggers whom have a large following within your category and engage with them.  Include them in your strategy, allow for gifts, pay (if need be) and support them – it will pay you back ten-fold.

3. Understand Latest Online language. It seems obvious and one would easily confuse this with just know in the language – Chinese simplified characters that is.  But a savvy online social media strategy includes effective conversational marketing and content driving with up-to-date fashionable online language.  It can change from month to month, so be sure to stay abreast of it and most of all use it.If you haven’t guessed yet, Chinese is the most used language online.

For me, the issue of payment stands out as many bloggers – professional and not – receive payment in Asia without any ethical issues. We’re not just talking payment for contracted work, this is payment for promotion of products or other items, but in a landscape where paying bloggers can be acceptable (note: this applies to some not all bloggers, and typically only local ones) it is all the more surprising to see just how trusted bloggers remain.

Details of a Philippines-based blogger who most was most definitely up to no good blew up with the ‘Big Bad Blogger’ scandal.

More from fellow AC blogger James Cordova:

Margaux Salcedo, a food writer at the Sunday Inquirer Magazine of the Philippine Daily Inquirer, whipped up a storm with a story in the magazine today about Big Bad Blogger, a food blogger/reviewer/annihilator that, according to Ms. Salcedo, may have been in cahoots with a public relations firm that allegedly shakes down restaurants who refuse to hire its services.

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